Costa Rica - Rancho Mastatal

5th June 2010

So, not sure if I mentioned, but wee Vikki, Drew and Jordan (all from previous post) met on a Ranch in Costa Rica called Rancho Mastatal, located, unsurpisingly, in the village of Mastatal about 3 hours south of San Jose. Given that they'd been banging on about the place for ages, and I didn't have any particular itinerary, I joined Vikki as she went back to start her internship.

The journey from Granada took us a good couple of days starting with an un-airconditioned Ticabus down to San Jose where we hung out (behind the security of sheet-metal gates at our hostel - not the best capital city) for a couple of days in the pouring rain, and then to Puriscal on a normal coach style bus and then finally to Mastatal on a chicken bus.

Chicken buses are named for their "bring anything on board" policy. In this case there were no chickens, but there was a twin tub washing machine, a strimmer, some boxes of barbed wire and an awful lot of animal feed, all piled onto the back of a retired American school bus (the yellow kind from movies). Vikki and I, with our usual British "oh no, you first" politeness ended up throwing our backpacks on after all the aforementioned items and therefore didn't manage to get seats which was super-fun!

After a while we did manage to get seats only for some old dude, drinking mooonshine from a Coke bottle stuffed down his trousers, to start bothering us. The rest of the bus was in fits of laughter as he kept touching me on the head and shoulder and trying to get me to do complicated handshakes. Sadly it wasn't really appropriate for me to demonstrate my Spanish by telling him to bugger off as it would have been really impolite given the communities are really small and everyone knows each other.

We finally arrived in the evening, just in time to haul our bags to Tiburon's house (more on Tiburon later) and head back up to the ranch house for our tea.

The Ranch is run by Tim and Robin and their 2 year-old daughter Sole (short for Soledad) who are American and ex Peace Corp. They've had the Ranch about 8 years and in that time have built numerous buildings from wattle, daub and lime render, started their farm (goats, tons of chickens, pond awaiting tilapia, veggie gardens) and contributed massively to the local community in terms of employment, community projects and loans/grants amongst other things. It's a really amazing place. It's run pretty much like I would imagine a commune to be, with communal meals, communal living and everyone contributing to the running of the place. But there's not too much hippy nonsense which suited me just fine!! You can see more about the place on their website.

Tiburon's house belongs (not surprisingly) to a guy called Tiburon who hails from the US. Tiburon means "shark" in Spanish and relates to a run in he had with a bull shark in Belize 20+ years ago.
Tiburon survived the attack with an impressive gouge and some pretty cool teeth marks in his arm. He's affiliated with the ranch and therefore his house is generally looked after in his absence by

someone that would otherwise be living at the ranch. Luckily for me, that person is Vikki as it's fabulous.

The house is absolutely amazing, built with no doors and minimal walls over two floors with amazing views out over the football field to La Cangreha (the crab) peak.

After excelling myself on the first evening by spilling one of the liquid pork-fat-and-palm-oil homemade candles all over the dining table, I settled into a great week of foods, friends and hands that smelled of cow shit!

The first morning I got my official tour of the ranch from Vikki and then Vikki, Anne (US) and I cleaned Tiburon's house top to bottom as he was due home soon. Turns out I can actually clean, I just choose not to most of the time!

The following few days involved lots of cooking (burning batches of Vikki's granola as the oven runs really hot), making mango bread (the challenge in the kitchen when I was there was to inventively use up the baskets upon baskets of mangos in the scullery!), cooking breakfast at 530 am for the ranch, making Biscotti, turning piles of Bokashi (fermented chicken manure), making jam from red hibiscus leaves (using tapadulce, a liquid cane sugar), making glasses from old glass beer, soft drink and wine bottles and making daub from 1 part cowshit, 1 part clay and 3 parts gravel, mixed with bare feet, and shaped into bricks with bare hands (hence the lovely scent I carried for a few days!)

There was also a reasonable amount of eating, drinking (rum with frozen cubes of pineapple in - mmmmm) hanging out at the bar and gossiping wildly (the ranch seems to inspire unusual behaviour!) Adam (US) treated us to a dance recital (Beyonce's Single Ladies) and concert (Flight of the Conchords mostly) and we spent a vast amount of time escorting Vikki home past the bar full of enthusiastic locals.

Tiburon was kind enough on our day off to take a bunch of us up into the national park and up to a beautiful set of waterfalls. We climbed up the first half of the waterfall to a flat area and just hung out, sitting in the spray and lying in the water which was really refreshing. We ate that evening at the Soda, a kind of corner shop, and were treated to the entertainment of the owner's puppy and cat having an all out fight. The cat won!

The following evening's entertainment was provided by an incredibly drunk Costa Rican biologist, visiting the area, storming into the ranch house and refusing to leave. He was persuaded into the front garden where he promptly fell into a swale which was funny. He was then picked up by the menfolk and removed from the property! Never a dull moment at the ranch!

I met some really lovely people at the ranch in addition to those mentioned above: Ashley and her daughter Courtney, a really sweet girl called Morgan, Carolyn and Tyler who know all about the ranch and all the new interns who I hope are having a great time as we speak. (Apologies to anyone I've forgotten - I'm useless.)

I left the ranch with Tiburon (on his way to pick up his students) and Adam (on his way home) and made it back to Granada in Nicaragua the same day.